Behind the Science -Technologies and infrastructure

Behind the published research papers there were stories of how ideas came into being, how equipment was designed, made and used, and how things failed at times. Some of these stories can be found in the Internal Reports and Cruise Reports.

Groundbreaking technologies developed at WormleyA number of the technology developments made at Wormley led to a better understanding of the oceans. Some of these are decribed below and may be accessed by the following links. There are also links to internal reports describing technical developments and to cruise reports that describe work at sea.

We also plan to prepare articles on :-• Shipboard computing• The FRAM Fine Resolution Antarctic ModelWe'd welcome suggestions via the blog page for other topics, or comments and corrections on the ones already published.

Neutrally buoyant floats – were arguably one of the most important technological developments in marine science. John Swallow developed the float in the mid 1950s as a means of measuring currents deep below the surface of the open ocean for the first time. They were used to confirm the prediction of an undercurrent beneath the Gulf Stream (1958) and gave a first glimpse of the energetic mesoscale “weather” in the 1960 Aries Experiment off Bermuda. In 1970s floats were developed that recoverable and others were tracked using lower frequency sound and independent of an attendant ship. These allowed the ocean mesoscale to be mapped across entire ocean basins.

Left. John Swallow (glasses) and Gordon Volkman (WHOI) preparing a float for deployment in the Irminger Sea.
Above. The global array of Argo profiling floats contributed by 30 countries and providing profiles of temperature and salinity to 2000m every 10 days.

In the 1990s during the World Ocean Circulation experiment a float that surfaced at regular intervals to be tracked by satellite led to global scale deployments and to the collection of temperature and salinity profile data. These 3000+ floats of the Argo array are now used to monitor ocean heat content. A more complete version of this story is available here. Material contributed by John Gould.

Autosub - autonomous underwater vehiclesAutosub - a programme to develop the technology and science applications of autonomous underwater vehicles began at Wormley. In the 1980s Brian McCartney, Stuart Rusby, Nic Flemming, among others, were taken with the potential to harness then-new technology developments in high capacity batteries, microprocessors and navigation to develop untethered underwater vehicles for geological, geophysical and physical oceanographic observations and measurements. With the strong support of John Woods and NERC, the Autosub programme was born. Peter Collar, as Project Manager, with many colleagues at Wormley and outside, undertook a series of studies followed by specific development projects on sub-systems including propulsion, command and control and hydrodynamic design. An outline of how ideas formed in the 1980s, captured in the painting by Polly Williamson of an Autosub returning from a mission under a polar ice sheet, became reality after two decades of persistent effort by engineers and scientists at Wormley and then Southampton is available here.

Polly Williamson's impression of a polar Autosub mission ca. 1990, with water column and seabed data gathered under Pine Island Glacier by Autosub3 in 2009.

GLORIA Geological Long Range Inclined Asdic GLORIA was designed to map seabed structures using sound signals transmitted from a towed vehicle. The trials of the first GLORIA vehicle (10m long, 2m diameter) were carried out in 1969 from RRS Discovery (the only ship capable of operating the vehicle) and full operation started later that year. GLORIA soon started to reveal new seabed structures. The cumbersome vehicle was replaced with a more capable Mk 2 version in 1977 that could be fitted to almost any suitable ship, had longer range and could be towed faster. It could map around 10,000km2 per day . These capabilities led to the 1984 to 1989 survey of the US Exclusive Economic Zone carried out from the RV Farnella. (see the Introduction page). GLORIA design, construction and operation were a major undertakings but GLORIA images had a major impact on our understanding of deep ocean structures. Eventually GLORIA capabilities were overtaken by commercial towed sidescan developments and operations ceased in 1997. A fuller description with particular focus on the science results can be downloaded here.

An early OBS instrument.

Ocean Bottom SeismographsThe project to build the Pop-Up
Bottom Seismic Recorder (known as PUBS) started at NIO in August 1967. It continued
work begun in the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics, Cambridge University by
Bob Whitmarsh for his PhD. The rationale for building an instrument that could record near-surface explosions on the sea-bed in oceanic depths was that it would provide a fixed and quieter sensor location, contact with the ‘solid’ Earth and the ability to observe first arrivals from the sediment layer. A few very expensive US instruments, designed for long-term monitoring of nuclear explosions, existed at the time but no ocean-bottom seismic recorder was known to exist in the academic world. After various minor improvements, by May 1970 twenty-three PUBS launches had been carried out with the loss of only one instrument out of the three that had been built by then. Probably the most significant improvement in the PUBS’s design occurred in 1985 when Ken Peal, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, spent a 12-month sabbatical at IOS working with Bob Kirk to develop a digital tape-recording system to replace the analogue tape recorders. The first data with the new Digital Ocean Bottom Seismographs (now called DOBS) were acquired at sea in April 1986. Over 27 years, from 1968 until 1995, the PUBS/DOBS became the UK’s workhorse for wide-angle seismic measurements at sea; a total of 268 deployments had been made with very few losses. The PUBS/DOBS provided the basis of many publications by Bob Whitmarsh and colleagues both within NIO/IOS/IOSDL and from other labs in the UK and abroad. A consortium led by the Southampton Oceanography Centre, secured funding from NERC to acquire 28 OBSs which were delivered in 2003 from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Since 2003 the OBS pool has been operated jointly by the Universities of Southampton and Durham; in 2007 it became a NERC facility and since then it has grown to around 50 instruments.A more complete history can be downloadedhere.

An early tide gauge deployment.

Open Ocean Tide GaugesIn the late 1960s David Cartwright’s work on tidal theory had reached the point at which there was a need for tidal measurements from the open sea. So a seabed hydrostatic pressure-recording gauge ws devel oped which could be deployed for minimum periods of 29 days around the edge of the continental shelf.

The prototype instrument was deployed in 1969 and there followed a series of deployments round the shelf edge. In 1973 the formation of IOS led to the concentration of UK tide research at Bidston on Merseyside. The Bidston team built on the experience gained at NIO, making use of advances in microprocessor and data storage technology to develop successful deep ocean gauges with greatly increased endurance and capable of recording not only deep-sea tides but also long-term changes in ocean bottom pressure.

TOBI (Towed Ocean Bottom Instrument)TOBI was developed in the 1980s at that time GLORIA was at the height of her powers, but it was clear that there was a need for higher-resolution data (GLORIA’s pixel size was ~50 – 100 m). TOBI’s core instrumentation comprises a 30 kHz sidescan sonar, three- component magnetometer, ~7kHz broad-band sub-bottom profiler, and CTD. and was towed about 400m above the sea floor .

Initial testing in October 1984 concentrated on developing safe procedures for launch and recovery, and towing stability. TOBI’s first deep-sea test deployment was dramatic! With the vehicle at a depth of 4000 m, all signals were lost. After a difficult recovery it was discovered that the vehicle had been completely destroyed by an implosion of its glass sphere buoyancy. A revised design used syntactic foam for buoyancy and this has proven incredibly robust.

TOBI’s 30 kHz sidescan, (wavelength of 5 cm), was ideally suited to imaging a great variety of volcanic, tectonic, sedimentary, and biogenic structures on the seafloor and the data have provided new insights, and often paradigm shifts, in many areas of seafloor geology.

A complete description of TOBI development and of the research it has enabled can be downloaded here.

Double Barrelled Capstan/Winch This winch ws developed by Dennis Gaunt at Wormley in the late 1960s so as to safely deploy curremt meter moorings made up a sectios of wire joined by shackles and under tensions of up to 1 ton.

Eventually the winch was maketed by Lebus International and is still in use today, not only on NERC vessels but on research ships in Europe an the USA.

A more complete description of how the DBC came to be developed can be downloaded here. A description by Bob Wallace of his driving the DBC on his first cruise with NIO is on the "People" page of this web site.

Ship-Borne Wave Recorder (SBWR)On February 8/9 2000, RRS Discovery (in her post-lengthening 90m guise) was hove to in the Rockall Trough waiting for the weather to abate and be able to resume CTD stations on the so-called “Ellett Line”. The wind was averaging between 21 and 25 m/s (F 10 -11) and between 19.00 and 01.00 the ship encountered some extremely large waves*. Fortunately Discovery has always been fitted with a shipborne wave (SBWR) recorder so it was possible to tell how big. The largest was 29.05m peak to trough and may have been the largest wave ever recorded at sea.

The SBWR had been developed at NIO in the early 1950s and subsequently it was used extensively particularly in UK waters to record data that became vital to the definition of wave climate for the offshore oil industry. The story of the development of the SBWR can be found here.

In the early 1970s, hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation, fisheries, meteorological forecasting, pollution control and coastal protection engineering drove a demand for operational meteorological and oceanographic data. The development of arrays of moored data buoys was seen as a way to gather operational data from the open sea. Buoy technology was most advanced in the USA and work was underway in West Germany, France and Norway. In the UK, the NERC Standing Committee on Ocean Data Stations (SCODS) a need for the UK to be active in this area particularly for data in the the North Sea. The Department of Trade and Industry commissioned a feasibility study by NIO that led to the construction of a 6m diameter experimental data buoy, DB1. The buoy was to provide experience in gathering data and making it available in real-time i.e. a fully operational measurement system. It would also provide a testbed for oceanographic and meteorological sensors and associated sub-systems.

A team at NIO, which included Mark Carson, Peter Collar, 'Dickie' Dobson, Jack Langford and 'Tom' Tucker submitted its report and outline specification in September 1972 and the prototype buoy started sea trials in November 1975. It incorporated many innovative ideas and became the forerunner of the ocean buoy network now operated by the UK Met Office. An article by Peter Collar on the buoy development is available here.

MultimetFrom the earliest days of NIO and Henry Charnock’s pioneering work on air-sea interaction, the lab at Wormley played an important role in marine meteorology. This is typified by the development and deployment n the 1980s and 1990s of the Multimet suite of meteorological sensors. The attached documentdescribes the package and its development. Multimet and a similar i-Met system developed at Woods Hole set the standard for ship-borne meteorological measurements during the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) in the 1990s and provided a firm foundation on which modern day ship-borne met observations are based.

Acoustic releasesThe develoment of reliable acoustic releases has been the key to enabling a wide range of oceanographic observing to be implemented from the 1970s onwards. The development of acoustic releases at NIO was started by Dennis Gaunt and Mac Harris in the mid 1960s and was then carried forward by Mac working with Greg Phillips and Mike Sawkins. The small size of the CR200 releases meant that they could be used in a wide range of applications and they served the community well for 20 years until superceded in the 1990s by commercially manufactured systems that had the advantage of transponders giving acoustic ranges. The attached document gives a detailed description of the development and manufacture of the CR200 releases.

Current meter mooringsIt has become quite routine nowadays to deploy large arrays of moorings carrying current meters and other recording instruments for periods of many months and with a high rate of data return. It was not always so. From the mid 1960s onwards engineers and scientists at Wormley worked doggedly to learn how instruments behaved hidden for weeks and months deep in the ocean, to chose materials that would withstand corrosion and to develop the means to deploy and recover moorings reliably and safely .There were many early failures and these still lie of the floor of the North Atlanic. But that persistence ultimatly bore fruit and is reflected our what we can now achieve. The story of the development or our mooring capability is told in the ﻿attached document.

Innovation in navigation.

Are we there yet? is not just a question from bored children in the back seats of a car. For many years it was a question that ocean going scientists asked themselves when faced with a vast and featureless ocean.Edward Cooper and Gwyn Griffiths have taken the lead in documenting how our ability to answer the question “Are we there yet?” has developed since the era of celestial navigation. Our demands as scientists pushed the boundaries of what was possible and so the early adoption of new technologies was paramount, even if it did lead us down a few blind alleys. The story can be downloaded here

IOS and IOSDL Internal Reports

First issued in 1974, these reports contained a wide variety of material. Their circulation was world-wide, through cooperative agreements between Libraries, augmented by the authors sending copies to their colleagues. Some were science reports, describing methods or presenting results, at times preliminary to publication in the open literature. Others documented technical developments, computer programs and proposed standards. A full list of the 307 reports issued between 1974 and 1995 is available here as an Acrobat pdf file.Copies of most of the reports are available to purchase in printed form from the National Oceanographic Library at Southampton. Enquiries can be sent to nol@noc.soton.ac.uk. However, for most of the reports, copies as Acrobat pdf files are available to download free of charge via the University of Southampton Eprints server. To find and then download a report, go toEprints Advanced Search (opens in new window), and type the first few words of the wanted title into the Title search box (note that the search can be case sensitive). When found, clicking on the PDF icon at the right of the results box will download the file.

IOS and IOSDL Cruise Reports

A list of IOS and IOSDL Cruise Reports is available here as an Acrobat pdf file. The 249 Cruise Reports from 1973 to 1995 cover a wealth of material, primarily describing cruises on Discovery, Shackleton, Sarsia, Edward Forbes, John Murray, Challenger, Frederick Russell and Charles Darwin, but also describing cruises on charter vessels and research vessels of other nations.Cruise Reports are available in the same format and manner as for Internal Reports. For printed copies, contact nol@noc.soton.ac.uk. For copies as pdf files, go to Eprints Advanced Search(opens in new window),and search for the first few words of the title (note that the search can be case sensitive, RRS for example, must be in upper case).An alternative route to finding Cruise Reports is via the British Oceanographic Data Centre Cruise Inventory search page. This allows for a comprehensive search. To find Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, or Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, Deacon Laboratory, or indeed National Institute of Oceanography reports, go to the Host Laboratory search box. You can also refine your search using the other boxes. To download the Cruise Report, click Show at the right of an entry, which takes you to the cruise information page, then click the pdf icon on the Cruise Report line.